


St Anthony in the Wilderness

by autiotalo (orphan_account)



Category: Die Ärzte
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-28
Updated: 2010-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-12 06:26:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/autiotalo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Africa, Farin ponders on his relationship with Bela.</p>
            </blockquote>





	St Anthony in the Wilderness

"After three weeks [travelling alone] you look at yourself honestly.   
You're naked. That can be dangerous if you carry demons within you.   
But maybe one should do that, like an exorcism."   
\- Farin Urlaub, _Galore_ , May 2005

The first of the Tabaski sheep is slaughtered at eleven o'clock. These things are never structured, never set in stone, but the first kill usually takes place while the wave of morning prayers rises like the wind over the great mud-brick walls of the mosque. The sound of the prayers drowns out the bleating of the sheep, but nothing can disguise the trickle, and then the gush, of blood into the streets.

Farin has visited the Sahara enough times to know that to be a vegetarian is regarded as a sign of poverty, a symbol of asceticism, or frowned upon as a Western luxury. Only a wealthy white man would forgo the necessity of meat, for he must surely be rich enough not to care about his next meal.

He has heard of vegetarians who, on visiting these parts of Africa, have gone back to eating meat in order to break the monotony of the simple diet. Farin likes to imagine that he is stricter with himself than those fallen few. Perhaps, he thinks, he is an ascetic after all.

As he walks through the trodden streets of Djenné, past the eerie, alien beauty of the mud mansions, the cries of the tethered sheep begin to disturb him. The morning is hot, the sun fierce in its detachment. It is only January, and yet it is almost unbearable to stand hidden in the darkest shade. The stench of curdled blood, rich and dark, makes him sweat more than does the heat of the sun.

Farin takes his motorbike and goes out into the desert, away from the silver-flash-mirror gleam of the Niger. Sometimes he doesn't want the comfort of civilisation. Where there is water, there is always civilisation. Away from water and into the dust, there lies isolation and annihilation, insight and wisdom. It is necessary, Farin believes, to experience these states – not as a balance, not as punishment, but as means of renewal.

He wears black: habitually, like a monk. In the Sahara, that is a punishment in itself. The heat remains with him long after the sun has set. Any sensible traveller would wear pale colours to reflect the sunlight. Farin has never been sensible, no matter how hard he's tried.

The motorbike comes to a halt on the side of the road. He is far enough from the city to smell only the desert and the dry, sun-blown air. There is no blood in the desert. Any liquid spilt, whatever form it takes, is drank down eagerly by the sand. Once the wind or an animal has scuffled through the faint stain, there is no trace of anything spilled at all.

Farin crouches on the sand like a Chinese, balancing his weight through the balls of his feet, resting his forearms on his knees. The posture is comfortable – he can maintain it for hours at a time – but he knows that when he stands up again, his knees will crack and he will feel pain.

He looks at the sand. It's not the golden, fine-grained sand of rolling, endless dunes. Outside Djenné, it's red and grey, gritty and coarse. It has its own scent, the stench of the Harmattan, of earth and constant movement. It has its own taste, too: one of mud and dry death, of life abandoned before it reaches water; before it can survive.

Out in the desert, to the south of him, there is a border: the end of Mali and the beginning of Burkina. He's never been to Burkina. One day he thinks he might go there, walk in a straight line from the mud walls of Djenné, right across the border. Nobody would stop him. The border is an invisible thing, marked by government checkpoints only along the few roads, but it is there nonetheless.

Just because something is invisible, it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Farin thinks the mark of a man lies in how much he allows the invisible to rule his life. He has stopped at borders before; pulled back from them even when no border-guard was present to check his passport.

It annoys him, sometimes, that he needs the sanction of officialdom. Or perhaps it is merely the privacy, the enclosure, of a border that appeals to his nature. His own privacy is an illusion he works hard to maintain. If every man is an island, then he is ringed with conflicting currents and the sharpest reefs of coral.

There is a flex of reality on the horizon. The air shimmers, like a mirage. A column of dust is thrown into the air. A tiny whirlwind, a dust devil, a demon. Farin watches it wander this way and that. Nothing is wasted in the desert; everything has a meaning - even a dust devil.

The erratic path of the tiny sand-whirl reminds him of someone. He allows himself to think of Bela for the first time since he arrived in Africa. He always puts up barriers, borders, between them whenever he goes away. In Mali, there are so many obstacles to hide behind: the Mediterranean, the Atlas Mountains, the vast sweep of the Sahara. Like St Anthony in the wilderness, he must retreat from temptation and distraction in order to evaluate its place in his life.

But while Bela is invisible to him now, his presence is still keenly felt.

Farin indulges a whimsy; imagines that the dust devil is Bela. It is chaotic and untidy, flinging around the sand in its path, heedless of what it tramples. It is directionless, drifting first one way and then the other; and yet it has a direction, a goal. It is a slave to the wind that drives it, the breath that was born on the coast of the Atlantic and drags across the continent; and yet it continually breaks free of the path set for it by the wind.

He watches it, and wonders if Bela is bad for him. Then he reverses the thought, and wonders if he is bad for Bela. He thought so, once, when he was much younger, and much more foolish. Back then, he'd let Bela go, thinking that it was for the best. Thinking that Bela would have no pride, and would fight to stay with him.

But Bela had put up his chin in defiance, and sniffed, wrinkling his nose a little. The corner of his mouth had tilted, tightened. And then he'd said, "Fine. If that's what you want," as if he knew what Farin was trying to do.

Not long after, Bela had started again. With Depp Jones. With Rod.

Farin knows he's only experienced true pain three times in his life. The day he'd let go of Bela had been one of those times.

When they came back together, both admitting a state of incompletion without the other, they had fallen into bed too quickly, before the wounds had properly healed. They'd been too happy, too eager to start afresh. It had worked, for a time; but then the continental drift pulled them apart again, made them as distant as foreign lands across borders, as islands separated by oceans.

And yet, they remain together. Farin has never understood why. He wonders, now, whether it is from his desire, or Bela's need. In his arrogance, he cannot imagine a state of mutual dependency. He thinks that the dust devil exists outside of the equation of sand and colliding winds and surface heat. He thinks this, and believes it, even though he knows he's wrong.

The dust devil breaks over him.

Farin leans forward into it, almost unbalanced. He lets it lick at him, allows it to drive through the topmost layers of skin on his face and hands. The sand is dry and surprisingly cold when it collapses about him in waves of sheer sound. It grinds and flays, forcing him to slough off his skin; and it feels almost good. For a moment, as the wind and sand – as the demon – goes through him, Farin feels the pain of being human, and he wallows in it.

The little storm passes. He shakes sand from his hair. It pours, red like desiccated blood, from the folds of his clothes. It's in his ears, his eyes, his mouth and nose. He swallows it, feeling the gritty texture scratch at his tongue and throat. With reddened, crusted eyes, he looks around at the desert.

In front of him there used to be a small ridge. The dust devil swathed through it and ruined the knife-edge spine on the dune. It's flattened, as if a surly teenager had kicked down a child's sandcastle on the beach. The shape of what had been is still visible despite the destruction.

There's something buried under the sand. Farin stares at it for a while, at the slight indentations made in the falling slope of red, and then he rocks forwards on his feet and brings himself to his knees. He crawls over to the shape in the sand, beneath the miniature dune, and carefully, he starts to dig.

A few minutes of excavation brings to light a curved white bone. As Farin cleans the area around it, tenderly, his hand brushes a second bone. It, too, is curved like its neighbour. Further exploration reveals that this is a ribcage, broader and rounder than a human's. He is both relieved and disappointed by this knowledge.

His concentration narrows to his task. The bones are dry, clean, bathed and rubbed down by sand. They feel reassuring in his hands when he strokes them. Before long, he has uncovered the column of the spine, and is working his way towards the skull. He brushes away the sand, leans close and blows upon it, gently, the way he's seen TV archaeologists work.

Farin has no thought about what kind of animal he's found. It's the bones that fascinate him. The bones: and the nature of the creature's death. He wonders if it was slaughtered, like the sheep in Djenné, or if it died a natural death. His fingers read the shape and surface of the bones, searching for clues: cut-marks, splinters, breaks.

Finally, he uncovers the skull. There are curling horns protruding from its temples, and the eye-sockets are full of sand. Its long, smooth nose disintegrates around the nostrils. When he first sees it, Farin thinks of it as a demon.

It is a sheep, a ram. Suddenly he doesn't want to dig any longer. He sits back on his heels and hugs his knees, looking at the skull. It seems to be a sign.

The feast of Tabaski, he knows, is about sacrifice. The sacrifice of Ishmael by his father Ibrahim: the sacrifice that was not a sacrifice, because God substituted a ram for the boy at the last possible moment.

Farin thinks that sacrifice is not in the action, but in the intent. He smiles, and feels his lips crack with the heat.

His sacrifice is to give up Bela. He does not know what will be substituted. But he thinks it will be enough.


End file.
